Luke 12:32-40

 Sermon - August 8, 2010.

In the days before everyone carried a cell phone or blackberry 24/7, a man went out alone to hike a remote wilderness trail. Exhilarated by the view, he climbed higher and higher along a path that dropped off into a deep gorge. And then, distracted, he took a misstep, and plunged over the side. It was nothing like Saturday morning cartoons, when Wiley Coyote steps off the cliff and there is that moment when he is suspended in air, until he looks down and realizes there is nothing beneath him. Wiley Coyote even has time to wave to the viewers before his descent. Not so with our poor unfortunate hiker as he bounced down the rock face until, finally, mercifully, there was a branch he was able to grab hold of, hang on to. He was an average guy in average shape, and he wasn’t too sure how much stamina he had to dangle his body weight from this branch – how long before his strength would give out and he would plummet if not to his death, certainly to many broken bones at the bottom of the canyon.  So, he did what any sensible person would do – he yelled, “Help! Help! Is anybody up there?”

And a resonant voice that seemed to come from above answered, “I am here, my child.”

“Can you throw me a rope? Or call the forest rangers? Or get the fire department to set up one of those trampoline nets at the bottom of the cliff? Anything, i can’t hang on much longer!”

And the voice said, “My child, i am the living God. Don’t be afraid. Let go of the branch, and i will catch you.”

Long pause. “Is anybody else up there?”

Be not afraid. This encouragement appears several times in Luke’s gospel. An angel says it – fear not! – to  the old priest Zechariah in the temple, a man who has been a priest so long he’s given up expecting angels or anything else marvellous to happen in worship. An angel says it – fear not – to  young Mary when he imparts the news that every teenaged girl fears: you are pregnant. An angel says it – fear not – to a bunch of grubby shepherds on the watch for wolves and thieves one night. Jesus picks up the mantra when a man named Jarius comes to him with the desperate, defeating news – “my daughter is dead” – Fear not. When the storm is beating against the disciples and the boat is tossed on the waves, Jesus says, Fear not. And after the obliterating execution of their leader, two disciples numb with grief trudge along the road to Emmaus and they are greeted by a stranger: fear not. And here, he says it again: Fear not, little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kin-dom. Fear not!

Well, easy for him to say. Most of us feel like that hiker, hanging on to that branch by our fingernails. And most of us are even too afraid to say out loud to God, “Is anybody else up there?” but we live that question out in our lives – fear not? You are kidding me! A recent New Yorker magazine article[1] points to the rise of dystopian fiction aimed at teens and young adults. Dystopian is the opposite of utopian – a dystopia is an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be. Or maybe not so imaginary – one young adult author points out that high school is pretty much a dystopia. Back in my day (just after Noah’s flood), high school consisted of air-tight categories: the jocks and cheerleaders, the prefects and intelligentsia, the losers in the 3 year technical program, the mid-pack kids who weren’t in any of those groups and weren’t outstanding at anything, and the geeks and freaks who were tormented mercilessly and bullied unrelentingly. You had to be careful who you were seen talking to, or you might be reassigned to another group. Fear not? You’ve got to be kidding.

Of course, in high school we worried about more than our own social status at Winston Churchill Collegiate. We worried about the war in Viet Nam and race riots and the nuclear bomb and pollution. We were cynics and sceptics, and all vowed very seriously that none of us would ever, ever bring children into such a messed up world.

My father didn’t lessen my worries, but did provide another view. When i told him that one of my classmate’s dads had built a bomb shelter in their backyard, my father’s diplomatic response was, “The guy’s a nut.” My dad didn’t write the famous Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” but his philosophy of life was pretty darn close to that. When i was filled with teen-aged angst and obsessing about all the terrible things in the world, my dad would always say, “90% of the things you worry about never happen, and the other 10% you can’t do anything about.”

Fear not, little flock, says Jesus to his followers, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kin-dom. The kin-dom of God is not a posthumous award for good deeds, not a post-death reward for service. In Luke’s gospel, the kin-dom of God is described as breaking out in our midst, right here, right now, not in the afterlife, but in this life. The kin-dom of God means there is life before death, and it is good. Fear not, little flock, fear not. It is when we stop fearing our neighbour and instead love our neighbour that we are most in danger of the kin-dom of God breaking out in our midst.

There is a possibility just such a thing may happen in New York City with the proposed building of Cordoba House. Named for the Spanish city where, for several centuries, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived peaceably under Muslim rule, the Muslim-backed Cordoba House community centre is being likened to the 92^nd Street Y – a place of community gatherings, flourishing arts, challenging speakers, and with a space for worship. The pundits of the right have been busy whipping up fear, and putting about the rumour that a mosque is going to be built on Ground Zero, which could be true if you call 2 blocks away right on the very spot. They claim it’s an insult to the victims of 9/11, conveniently ignoring that the Muslim financiers, cooks and cleaners who worked at the World Trade Centre also died in the attacks. I am naive enough to hope the Cordoba initiative goes forward – it is the most hopeful thing yet to come out of the terrible carnage of 9/11. Anything that promotes respectful conversation among the world’s religions might just bring the kin-dom of God into our midst.

Into the age of anxiety, Jesus says, Fear not. Don’t worry about yourself – care for others. Don’t squirrel money away in your RRSP or your GICs, give it away. Don’t hedge your bets, but go out to the hedge and listen for the song of the lark. Fear not. Live as if what you say you believe is actually true. Be not afraid, little flock. God wants nothing more than to give us the kin-dom.

Living worry-free is something the Mad Men of advertising convince us can be ours with the right toothpaste, clothing, time shares or investments. None of those have worked for me. And as for religion, i confess i’m  pretty much like that guy clinging to the branch half way down the cliff: is anybody else up there? But i recently read that Huston Smith, now 91 years old, life-long student of religion (if you ever took a course in comparative religions, you’ve likely read his 1958 book, The World’s Religions), he who has made a long-life study of religion and has known his own share of personal tragedy says, “I never met a religion I didn’t like.” And now, near the end of his long life, he says he is absolutely convinced of at least one thing: “We are in good hands.”[2] Fear not.

 

(C) barb m. janes

 

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Luke 11:1-13

July 25, 2010.

Sermon– July 25, 2010

 

Instead of doing what most of us do with those Publishers’ Clearing House cheques that clog up our mailboxes, Patrick Combs, for a joke, drew a smiley-face on the back of it and deposited it through his ATM. Two days later, when he made a routine ATM withdrawal, his receipt read one hundred thousand dollars. If you saw Patrick’s Fringe play, Man 1, Bank 0, you know the story – a hilarious ride of David vs. Goliath magnitude, as Patrick researches and discovers that if an American bank does not rectify its mistake in 24 hours, the customer gets to keep the cash. Collection agents menace, and for a frightening time, Patrick fears he will end up in jail. And at one frenzied moment in the play, he falls to his knees and bursts into prayer, a prayer that perhaps many of us have prayed, a prayer that begins, “God? It’s me, Patrick. I know I haven’t talked to you for a while, but…”  And he goes on to promise God a tithe, “10%, that’s what you like, right?” if God will just fix it so he can keep the $97,000 he deposited.

“Teach us to pray,” the disciples ask Jesus, one of the few things they ask him to teach them. Teach us to pray. I take some comfort in their request; it indicates to me that prayer does not come naturally or easily, but, like getting to Carnegie Hall, takes practice, practice, practice. Teach us to pray.

Who taught you to pray? What’s the first prayer you remember learning? For many of us, it’s not the Lord’s Prayer, but more likely “Now I lay me down to sleep” or the family table grace, “Thank you for the world so sweet/ thank you for the food we eat/ thank you for the birds that sing/ thank you, God, for everything.” Who taught you to pray? What do you remember learning? Do you still pray in the same way you did as a child? Do you ever feel like a too-big child caught playing “let’s pretend” when you pray? Teach us to pray…

At the downtown library one day when I was cruising the religion section, an earnest young Korean man asked for my help. He explained he was an exchange student, and he was still learning English, could I help him with a phrase he didn’t understand. The phrase in question was “fox hole prayers” – he knew what a fox is, a hole, and a prayer, but he couldn’t understand what it meant when you put those three words together. I did my best to explain that a fox hole was dug by soldiers at the front in World War I, and that the phrase was a kind of shorthand (another term we stumbled over). A fox hole prayer is the kind of prayer that Patrick Combs prayed when the collection agency threatened him with jail, the kind of prayer you let loose when things look bleak and desperate for you, the kind of prayer that might well begin as Patrick’s did: “God? It’s me. I know I haven’t talked to you for a while, but…”  Teach us to pray.

There is much more to be said about the prayer Jesus taught his disciples than I could possibly fit into one sermon, but the first two words leap out at me: Our Father. The first word, our, tells us, as our United Church creed does, we are not alone. We are a “we”. We are a community of faith, not rugged individualists. The word our also places us in a posture of humility – I am not addressing my God, but our God – God is not my exclusive, personal property. God cares for me, yes, but God’s care is much bigger than my little sphere. One of my favourite hymns is one we rarely sing because it is an evening hymn, The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended, a hymn that speaks of the voice of prayer never being silent, that as the sun sets here, it rises elsewhere; as I cease praying, someone, somewhere else begins. We are not alone. Our Father.

For some among us, the word Father conjures up happy associations of support, mentoring and fun (who was it who ran behind you when you learned to ride a bike or put the worm on the hook for you?). For some among us, the word Father is problematic. Some of us had a father who was less than godly but behaved as if he had certain God-given rights to govern “his” household like a tyrant. Some among us suffered physical, emotional, sexual abuse at the hands of their fathers. Some among us, including me, would apply a feminist critique to naming God only as Our Father, when scripture gives us a such a treasure-trove of images: Mother Eagle, rock, Creator, Sophia, Wisdom, Shepherd, Advocate, Deliverer, Light, Shield, Strength, Ancient of Days, the Still, Small Voice, Comforter, Cornerstone, Day Star, I Am, Friend. And that is not an exhaustive list!

The Biblical scholars are still debating whether the word we translate as Father is more accurately translated as Daddy. Choose what works for you – Father, Dad, Mother, Sophia…but think about this. In Jesus’ time, the name of God was considered too holy to be spoken aloud. Monty Python fans will remember the funny stoning scene in Life of Brian (who but Monty Python could make stoning funny). A man is to be stoned for the crime of blasphemy, the crime of speaking the name of God out loud. When the high priest reads the charge to the waiting crowd, the prisoner objects, “I don’t think it’s blasphemy just to say the name Jehovah”. The crowd gasps in horror, and the High Priest says, “You’re only making it worse for yourself”.  “Making it worse? How could it be worse? Jehovah, Jehovah, Jehovah!” Far be it from me to say whether or not Jesus is a Life of Brian fan, but by teaching the disciples to pray Our Father, he brought down the blasphemy law, brought God closer, and brought us into a relationship as close as close.

In using the name Father for God, Jesus democratizes religion, bringing it into an intimate relationship, bringing it as close as those we live with. Some Christians like to speak of what they call the vertical and the horizontal, the vertical being relationship with God and the horizontal being relationship with one another. It seems to me that in this prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, as in his very life, he brings God to earth and urges us to look for the image of God in one another. For many in the Christian community, this is still a revolutionary, perhaps even unorthodox idea. If God is as close as the human family, that has some ethical implications for how we treat members of the human family. We can no longer pretend that what happens in a gang house in Winnipeg’s north end, what happens in Stony Mountain prison, what happens on cocoa plantations or in clothing sweatshops has nothing to do with us. Rather, what happens to our sisters and brothers deeply concerns us. Because in our sisters and brothers, in the human family, God is present. This is as difficult and demanding for us as it was for Jesus’ followers. If you are looking for an easy spirituality, this ain’t it.

The prayer that Jesus taught us, so routine and rote in the year of our Lord 2010, was shocking and new, and still has much to shock us today.

I would invite us to pray that prayer in a contemporary paraphrase. You can find the words on page 916 of Voices United, words that may give us some small sense of how radical and unorthodox the prayer of Jesus is:

© barb m. janes

 

 

Eternal Spirit,

Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,

Source of all that is and that shall be,

Father and Mother of us all,

Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!

The way of your justice be followed by peoples of the world!

Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom

sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.

In the hurts we absorb from each other, forgive us.

In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.

From trials too great to endure, spare us.

From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,

now and for ever. Amen.

            (1988, Jim Cotter)

 

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